by Marko Kloos
The capsule goes down in the no-man’s-land between the PRCs, where the old Detroit was never fully razed and the new Detroit just went up around it in fortified islands. We find the chute and the escape module five hundred yards past the barrier dam between the towers. When we reach the capsule, Halley has already popped the explosive bolts that separate the halves of the module. She’s sitting in the rubble in front of the capsule on a section of the parachute that saved her life.
“This is the lousiest honeymoon ever,” she says when I come running up to her.
“I want to fucking punch you for that,” I say.
She looks at me with a tired smile. “ ‘Don’t do this,’ ” she says, repeating my last statement to her on the radio in a gently mocking tone. “I know how and when to work an ejection-seat handle, Andrew. I am not a moron.”
I hold out my hand to help her up, and she takes it.
“I guess we’re even now,” I say.
When we get back to the plaza, there are armored vehicles in front of the administration building, and at least a hundred of the militia troopers in OD green fatigues are securing the site and managing the flow of civilians. The other squads of Sergeant Fallon’s platoon are nowhere to be seen. Some of the green-clad militia spot us as we walk up the access ramp to the plaza, and two armored vehicles with heavy-machine-gun mounts on them come toward us.
“Oh, sure,” Sergeant Fallon says. “Now they show up. After we’ve done all the work.”
The armored vehicles stop in front of us, and their remote-controlled gun turrets swivel to cover us with their muzzles. We raise our hands slightly and keep them away from our weapons.
The tail hatches of the armored mules open, and more militia troopers file out and form a semicircle around us. Then the passenger hatch on the lead mule creaks open, and a tall black female trooper sticks her upper body out of the hatch to address us.
“Put your weapons and helmets on the ground, please,” she says.
Halley pops the retention strap on her leg holster, pulls out her pistol, and chucks it onto the ground in front of us. Then she looks at me and shrugs.
“Their turf,” she says.
“Homeworld Defense don’t just give up their guns,” Sergeant Fallon says. “I have no interest in getting hog-tied and shot like a dog in a dirty basement somewhere.”
The female militia trooper nods at Halley. “Guess it’s true what they say about selection,” she says. “All the smart ones go fleet.”
Something about her face rings a bell in the back of my head. It’s still dark, and she’s thirty meters away, but I can see tattoos on her face. An unusual tribal pattern. I’ve seen it once before, almost five years ago.
“Corporal Jackson?” I say. She startles.
I remove my helmet and drop it at my feet.
“Grayson,” I say. “We were in the 365th together.”
The woman I knew five years ago climbs out of her vehicle and comes trotting over to us. She is wearing the same fatigues all the other militia troops are wearing. Her collars bear the gold-leaf insignia of a major.
“Yes, we were,” she says to me, and smiles a very sparing little smile. “Yes, we were. Seems this night is full of surprises.”
“Oh, you ain’t seen nothing yet.” Sergeant Fallon removes her own helmet and flashes a grin. “Kameelah fucking Jackson. Still got that big stupid knife you were hauling everywhere?”
Jackson laughs out loud. The teeth she flashes are still perfectly straight and white. “I do, Master Sergeant. It’s in the truck.” Then her smile fades a little. “I’m still going to have to collect your weapons and your comms gear, please.”
“Are we POWs now?” Halley asks. “We just saved your bacon down here, you know. Should count for something, shouldn’t it?”
“You’re not POWs,” Jackson says. “You are making a donation to our cause. And no,” she addresses Sergeant Fallon. “We’re not going to hog-tie you and shoot you like a dog in a basement somewhere. So unsling your goddamn weapons already, and we can have our little reunion sitting down.”
The militia troops lead us to the back of one of the armored vehicles. They’re courteous and surprisingly professional about the whole thing. We surrender all our comms gear and weapons, and Corporal Jackson—I have a hard time thinking of my old squad mate as a major despite the rank insignia on her collars—gathers everything and deactivates the electronic stuff expertly.
“How on Earth did you end up falling in with this lot?” Sergeant Fallon asks her as we file into the armored troop transport.
“Long story,” Jackson says. “After Detroit a few years back, I went looking for the people who sprung that ambush on us. And I found them.”
She waits until we’ve all taken our seats and then straps herself into the jump seat closest to the door and its control panel.
“Funny thing, too. I was going to find them and kill the whole lot of them. For Stratton and Paterson, you know?”
I nod when she looks at me. Stratton and Paterson died the night Sergeant Fallon lost her leg and I got wounded. That was my last drop with the Territorial Army before I got to join the fleet, and hardly a week goes by where I don’t revisit the battle in my dreams, and sometimes my waking hours.
“But you didn’t,” I say.
“No,” she replies, and smiles that enigmatic smile of hers I remember well. “I didn’t. Was going to, for sure. But then I got captured and met the general. He was a colonel back then.”
“And he talked you into joining? You, Kameelah Jackson, the baddest corporal in the 365th?” Sergeant Fallon chuckles. “The man sure can talk, I’ll give him that.”
“Turns out we’ve been shooting at the wrong people all those years,” Jackson says. “Ain’t ashamed to admit I was wrong. About a bunch of things.”
“So you’re the general’s right hand now?” I ask. She looks at me and flashes a quick grin.
“Among other things,” she says. “Among other things.”
The armored troop transport rumbles along for the better part of an hour. Deprived of all our technology, we are blind in the windowless back—not that I would know my way around Detroit even if I had a view. When the transport finally comes to a stop, Sergeant Fallon is asleep, or pretending to be. I am bone-tired after the last few days of constant fear of death and combat, and I want to fall asleep, but my anxious brain won’t let me. The last time I was down here, among the same people, I didn’t get to leave under my own power. I was airlifted out, with two fléchettes in my left side.
The back door of the transport opens and reveals a large underground garage, stuffed full of equipment and vehicle parts. More militia troops in their olive-drab fatigues are milling around or working on gear. We file out of the armored transport and stretch our legs.
“This way,” Jackson says, and gestures toward one end of the hangar-like garage. Halley and I hesitate for a moment, and Jackson rolls her eyes.
“Ain’t no underground execution chamber around here,” she says. “I give you my word we won’t just shoot you in the back of the head.”
“I wasn’t worried about that,” I lie.
“Locking you in for the night,” she says. “For your safety. Don’t want to be walking these streets, in those uniforms. Shower and sleep, and tomorrow we’ll talk.”
“I want to stay with my husband,” Halley says, and moves closer to me. “You separate us now, we’re going to have a problem.”
“Of course you can stay together,” Jackson says. “We’re not uncivilized down here, you know.”
CHAPTER 26
I wake up on a military folding cot. Halley is on the cot with me, and she’s still asleep, drawing air in deep and even breaths. The room we are in is not in a basement. There’s a window on one wall, and light streaming in and illuminating the dingy flooring and tired paint on the walls. The blindfolds we were wearing when they led us here last night are on the floor next to our cot. I’ve spent enough time in welfare housing to know that
I’m in a PRC apartment somewhere.
I carefully extract myself from Halley’s embrace and climb out of the cot. The only thing I took off last night was my CDU jacket, which is hanging over the back of a chair nearby. The chair is screwed into the floor with lag bolts.
I put my jacket on and look around. The view from the window shows a sunrise over a nearby river. The morning sun is reflecting in a thousand windows out there, all fifth-gen PRC residence towers, clustered in groups of four along the riverbank.
Corporal–Major Jackson’s militia troops frisked us expertly last night and removed all weapons and everything that can be used to communicate, but they left me my personal document pouch and the simple little aluminum ring in it. My dog tags are missing from my neck for the first time in years, confiscated for their locator-beacon function that could trigger an SAR mission if a fleet unit got close enough to this place to pick up the signal.
The kitchenette is bare except for some plastic mugs in the cupboard and half a packet of soy coffee next to them. I draw some water in one of the mugs, add coffee powder, and heat the whole thing up in the food-processor unit for thirty seconds, just like I did back home when I still had to make do with soy-based everything.
When the coffee is ready, I take the mug over to the window and look over the river again while I take a sip. The PRC looks almost peaceful. The coffee is truly awful, but there’s something soothing and familiar about its perfect awfulness.
Halley wakes up a little while later and stretches on the cot like a cat after a nap in the sunshine.
“That smells pretty bad,” she says.
I walk over and sit down on the edge of the cot. She reaches for the mug, and I hand it to her to take a sip.
“Tastes bad, too,” she says, and makes a face.
“Lousy honeymoon,” I say. “Terrible wedding night. Worst bed-and-breakfast ever.”
“An auspicious start,” she says, and we both smile at each other like idiots.
Thirty minutes after I finish my coffee, there’s a knock on the door.
I look at Halley and raise an eyebrow.
“Come in?” she says toward the door.
There’s the mechanical snap of a heavy-duty lock, and the door opens. Outside in the hallway, I can see two militia troopers standing guard, sidearms on their belts. A tall black man steps into the room. He wears the same fatigues, unflattering and baggy OD green, and the rank insignia on his collar tabs are that of a one-star general—the old-school general’s star with five points, not the new post-reorganization rank with a gold wreath and a four-pointed star in it. His bearing carries authority more so than the stars on his collar. He wears his hair in a very short military-regulation buzz cut, and there’s quite a bit of gray flecking his temples, but he looks lean. A warrior, not a pencil pusher. There are no insignia or badges on his fatigues, only a name tape that says “LAZARUS.”
“Good morning,” he says. “I hope you’re at least a little rested. Last night was pretty eventful.”
“Good morning,” Halley replies. I merely nod.
“I’m General Lazarus,” he says. “I’m in charge of what the men have come to call the Lazarus Brigade.” He smiles curtly. “I was against that because of the personality-cult aspect and because it limits our growth by definition, but I have to admit that it has a nice ring to it. May I sit down?”
“Your place,” I say, and gesture at the chair. Lazarus isn’t armed, at least not visibly, but something tells me that it wouldn’t be wise to offer him violence, even disregarding the armed men standing in front of the door. He has the bearing of a veteran. There’s an efficiency to his movements, the sense of a tightly coiled spring underneath a deceptively smooth surface, that tells me this man used to do dangerous things for a living when he wore the uniform.
“Let me start by expressing my thanks for your defense of our PRC last night,” Lazarus says when he is sitting down. “You took a great deal of personal risk, and you bought us the time to muster our own forces and get the situation under control.”
“Then why are you detaining us?” Halley asks. “Stripping us of our weapons and gear. We couldn’t tell the rest of the fleet where we are even if we wanted to.”
“That is standard procedure, unfortunately. We need the weapons for our own use, and we can’t let you communicate with the fleet or the HD and give away our location. But you are not prisoners, just guests.”
“So we can leave?” I ask. “Right now?”
“You can,” Lazarus says. “We’d have to blindfold you and take you to a safe pickup spot, but yes, you can leave. I would, however, ask that you consider hearing me out before I let you go.”
“If this is an interrogation, it’s the weirdest one ever,” Halley says.
“It’s not an interrogation,” Lazarus replies. “It’s a job offer. A chance to switch career paths.”
I laugh and fold my arms in front of my chest. “Oh, man. And here I thought this week couldn’t possibly get any weirder.”
“We’ve had a complicated relationship with the government of the PRC,” Lazarus says. “At first, they clamped down on us with the Territorial Army. Then, when we got too big to get stepped on, they backed off, let us run our own affairs. As long as we kept things quiet and orderly, you see.”
“Didn’t look so quiet and orderly from orbit last night,” I say.
“The PRCs are in full rebellion,” he says. “The ones without a Lazarus Brigade or its equivalent are eating themselves and each other. What was left of the fleet after Mars just disappeared from orbit a few days ago without warning or explanation. Homeworld Defense—well, I think we know what they’ve turned into in the last few years. They never worked to defend us anyway. The NAC government has all but abandoned us to our fate. You could stay with your respective services and get used up to feed what’s left of the machine, or you could serve the Commonwealth here, at home, directly and without a self-interested bureaucracy. I can’t promise you a retirement bonus, but I can promise you food, a place to hang your hats, freedom of movement, and a purpose.”
Halley and I look at each other. She looks as bewildered as I feel right now.
“Lazarus Brigade is made up of veterans,” the general says. “Not exclusively—there aren’t that many of us around—but most of the leadership positions. Almost all our officers are veterans, and about half our senior enlisted. The rest are recruited and trained locally from the PRCs. We do the job the Homeworld Defense battalions have ceased to do a long time ago. We perform police duties and external defense. We run the infrastructure and network with other PRCs. But we are never enough people for the job, and we always need experienced veterans with desirable skills.”
Lazarus gets up from his chair and walks over to the window. Outside, the PRC has come to life with its day-to-day business, millions of people surviving by the slimmest of margins every day and week, living from ration day to ration day.
“The Lankies will be back sooner or later. I can’t count on the Homeworld Defense troops to defend us. They were absolutely no help last night, even though they have three bases within thirty flight minutes from here. When—not if—the enemy comes back, we are all that we have. I need people who can train others how to fight these things.”
He looks at Halley.
“Lieutenant Halley, you are a drop-ship pilot and a senior flight instructor. We have a small drop-ship fleet and very few pilots. If I could persuade you to stay with us and become head of our combat-aviation school, you could build your own program from scratch.”
Then he looks at me.
“You, Staff Sergeant Grayson, are a combat infantryman, and we always have a need for those. You are also a trained combat controller, and we have nobody in our ranks who’s qualified for that job. You would both be officers, if that sort of thing holds any importance to you. Lieutenant Halley, you would be a major in the brigade. Staff Sergeant Grayson, you would be a lieutenant. Or a master sergeant, if you would prefer to rem
ain an NCO. Some do.”
“Where did you serve?” I ask. “You were a combat grunt, weren’t you? Marines?” I wager a guess.
“Marines,” Lazarus confirms with a smile. “2080 to 2106. I was a lieutenant colonel of infantry.”
“Who made you a general in this outfit?” Halley asks.
“The men did,” Lazarus says. “I was more honored by that than by those silver oak leaves the corps bestowed on me.”
Halley and I look at each other again. She gives me the tiniest of smiles and then shrugs. Hell if I know, the shrug says.
“Can we think about it?” I ask.
“Of course you may think about it,” Lazarus says. “My offer is good until you ask us for a ride back to the safe pickup point.”
Lazarus straightens out the front of his tunic with a sharp and short tug.
“Are you hungry? Maybe you can discuss this better over breakfast.”
“I’m starving,” Halley says. “Yes, please. I’d like something to eat.”
“Have you made the same offer to Sergeant Fallon yet?” I ask, and Lazarus smiles.
“I have,” he says simply, and from the look he gives me, it’s clear that’s all he’s going to say about that particular negotiation.
Lazarus and the two guards with him take us down to the basement level, and then out into the fresh air of a residential PRC plaza. It’s not the same we defended last night—the barrier dam is intact, and there’s no seedpod hull wedged into the corner of one of the towers here. They all look identical from the air, and without my suit’s navigation gear, I couldn’t even begin to guess which of Detroit’s many PRCs we are in.
Lazarus leads us to the admin center in the middle of the plaza. The admin centers usually hold public-safety personnel and food-distribution stations. We see ration booths open, but no public-housing cops. Instead, we see olive-clad brigade troopers milling about among the civilians, and nobody’s shying away from them or cursing them from a distance.
